Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

Thank You, Joseph

A reflection for Advent 4, Year A

The conception not socially approved, an inauspicious start to marriage where the rule is the man’s right to be the first, but as we know this plays out differently. Joseph listens to God and the world is never the same. Is that not true every time we listen to God? Joseph, sainted Joseph, did not ask to raise a child technically not his, but what does that mean, not his? He claimed the baby, raised him in his trade, made sure he learned the Torah, respected his elders even when he knew more. This was a good father raising a blessed son.

The child was from the Holy Spirit; many wonder though If that means immaculate conception, parthogenesis, procreation without fertilization, or whether it means God’s blessing does not depend on following human rules. Is not every wanted child a gift from the Holy Spirit? Is a marriage license required by God for the child’s holiness? Can non-monogamous partners not give life to a blessed child? We spend so much energy trying to bend God to us when what Joseph, and so many others, show us is that God breaks rules, our rules, all the time.

We cannot contain God; if we could, God would not be God but god, an idol of our creation, the Creator being creature. We are wondrously made in God’s image, probably imagesin reality, not the other way around no matter our endless efforts to tell God who God is. The greatest spiritual gift is listening, a way of life requiring constant cultivation in order to defeat human need for control, and that means truly hearing and following what God says, including hard stuff, the counter-cultural directions and guidance, love bursting through and beyond all human restrictions.